Sir James Crichton-Browne FRS FRSE (29 November 1840 – 31 January 1938) was a leading Scottish psychiatrist, neurologist and eugenicist. He is known for studies on the relationship of mental illness to brain injury and for the development of public health policies in relation to mental health. Crichton-Browne's father was the asylum reformer Dr William A.F. Browne, a prominent member of the Edinburgh Phrenological Society and, from 1838 until 1857, the superintendent of the Crichton Royal at Dumfries where Crichton-Browne spent much of his childhood.
Crichton-Browne edited the highly influential West Riding Lunatic Asylum Medical Reports (six volumes, 1871–76). He was one of Charles Darwin's leading collaborators – on The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) – and, like Duchenne de Boulogne (at the Salpêtrière in Paris) and Hugh Welch Diamond in Surrey, was a pioneer of neuropsychiatric photography. He based himself at the West Riding Lunatic Asylum in Wakefield from 1866 to 1875, and there he taught psychiatry to students from the nearby Leeds School of Medicine and, with David Ferrier, transformed the asylum into a world centre for neuropsychology. Crichton-Browne then served as Lord Chancellor's Visitor from 1875 till 1922. Throughout his career, Crichton-Browne emphasised the asymmetrical aspects of the human brain and behaviour; and also, like Emil Kraepelin and Alois Alzheimer, made some influential predictions about the neurological changes associated with severe psychiatric disorders. Crichton-Browne was also a forceful advocate of eugenics, and in 1908 became the first president of the Eugenics Education Society.
In 1920, Crichton-Browne delivered the first Maudsley Lecture to the Medico-Psychological Association in the course of which he outlined his recollections of Henry Maudsley; and in the last fifteen years of his life, he published seven volumes of reminiscences. In 2015, UNESCO listed Crichton-Browne's clinical papers and photographs (about 5000 items in all) as items of international cultural importance.
Family background and education 1840–1866
Crichton-Browne was born in Edinburgh at the family home of his mother, Magdalene Howden Balfour. She was the daughter of Dr Andrew Balfour and belonged to one of Scotland's foremost scientific families. The Balfour home (at St John's Hill near Salisbury Crags) had been constructed in 1770 for the unmarried geologist James Hutton (1726–1797)Repcheck, Jack (2003) The Man Who Found Time: James Hutton and the Discovery of the Earth's Antiquity London and New York: Pocket Books (Simon and Schuster), , pp. 124–125.Buchan, James (2003) Capital of the Mind: How Edinburgh Changed The World London: John Murray. , pp. 272–299.Herman, Arthur (2003) The Scottish Enlightenment: The Scots' Invention of the Modern World London: Fourth Estate, a division of Harper Collins. , pp. 313–314. who was Magdalene Balfour's great-uncle. Crichton-Browne's father, the asylum reformer William A. F. Browne (1805–1885), was a prominent phrenologistKaufman, Matthew H. (2005) Edinburgh Phrenological Society: A History Edinburgh: The William Ramsay Henderson Trust.Jenkinson, Jacqueline (1993) Scottish Medical Societies 1731 – 1939: Their History and Records Edinburgh University Press, pp. 72–77. and his younger brother, John Hutton Balfour-Browne KC (1845–1921), wrote a classic account of the legal relations of insanity.Balfour Browne, J. H. (1871) The Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity London: J. & A. Churchill; San Francisco: S. Whitney & Co.
Crichton-Browne spent much of his childhood at The Crichton Royal in Dumfries, where his father was the medical superintendent from 1838 to 1857.McDowall, William (1873) History of the Burgh of Dumfries with notices of Nithsdale, Annandale and the Western Border 2nd Edition, Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, pp. 732–734.Comrie, John D. (1932) History of Scottish Medicine, 2 vols, London: Baillière, Tindall and Cox for The Wellcome Historical Medical Museum, see pp. 464–471.Henderson, D. K. (1964) The Evolution of Psychiatry in Scotland Edinburgh and London: Livingstone, pp. 72–74.Scull, Andrew (1991) The Asylum as Utopia: W.A.F. Browne and the Mid-Nineteenth Century Consolidation of Psychiatry London and New York: Tavistock/Routledge (includes a reprint of Browne, William A. F. (1837) What Asylums Were, Are, and Ought To Be Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black)Scull, Andrew, MacKenzie, Charlotte and Hervey, Nicholas (1996) Masters of Bedlam: The Transformation of the Mad-Doctoring Trade Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, , pp. 84–122Walmsley, Tom (1991) "Psychiatry in Scotland" (in) Berrios, G. E., and Hugh Freeman (eds) 150 Years of British Psychiatry 1841–1991 London: Gaskell/ The Royal College of Psychiatrists, pp. 294–305.Porter, Roy (editor) (1991) The Faber Book of Madness London and Boston: Faber and Faber, pp. 352–353. William A. F. Browne was a pioneering Victorian psychiatrist and an exponent of moral treatmentCormack, Alexander Allan (1966) Susan Carnegie 1744–1821: Her Life of Service Aberdeen University Press for Dr Cormack, pp. 297–305.Jones, Kathleen (1993) Asylums and After London: The Athlone Press, pp. 69–70 with an interest in the psychological lives of his patients as illustrated by their group activities, dreams and art-works. W. A. F. Browne also hoarded a huge collection of patient artPark, Maureen (2010) Art in Madness: Dr W.A.F. Browne's Collection of Patient Art at Crichton Royal Institution, Dumfries Dumfries and Galloway Health Board and this interest found a parallel in Crichton-Browne's later asylum photography. In his childhood, Crichton-Browne lost an older brother, William (aged 11) in 1846. He went to school at Dumfries Academy and then, in line with his mother's episcopalian outlook, to Glenalmond College. Shortly before his death, Crichton-Browne wrote a valuable account of his Dumfries childhood, including the visit of the American asylum reformer Dorothea Lynde Dix.Crichton-Browne, James (1940) "Some Early Crichton Memories" in C. C. Easterbrook (ed.) The Chronicle of Crichton Royal 1833–1936 Dumfries: Courier Press, pp. 1–6.
Crichton-Browne studied medicine at Edinburgh University, qualifying as an MD in 1862 with a thesis on hallucinations. Among his teachers was his father's friend Thomas Laycock (1812–1876) whose magnum opus Mind and BrainLaycock, Thomas (1860) Mind and Brain: or, The Correlations of Consciousness and Organization, 2 vols, Edinburgh: Sutherland and Knox; 2nd edn (1869) London: Simpkin and Marshall. is an extended speculative essay on neurology and psychological life.Beveridge, Allan (1996) On The Origins of Psychiatric Thought: the contribution of Edinburgh, 1730–1850, (in) 150 Years of Psychiatry, Vol. 2. The Aftermath edited by Freeman, Hugh and Berrios, German E., London: The Athlone Press, pp. 339–366. Crichton-Browne also drew on the writings of the physicians Sir Andrew HallidayHalliday, Sir Andrew (1828) A general view of the present state of lunatics, and lunatic asylums, in Great Britain and Ireland, and in some other kingdoms London: Underwood. and Sir Henry Holland. Like his father, Crichton-Browne was elected one of the undergraduate Presidents of the Royal Medical SocietyGray, James (1952) History of the Royal Medical Society 1737–1937 Edinburgh University Press. and, in this capacity, he argued for the place of psychology in the medical curriculum. In 1863, he visited a number of asylums in Paris (including the Salpêtrière), and after working as assistant physician at asylums in Exeter (with John Charles Bucknill), Warwick and Derby, and a brief period on Tyneside, Crichton-Browne was appointed physician-superintendent of the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum at Wakefield in 1866. This was also the year in which his father served as the president of the Medico-Psychological Association (now the Royal College of Psychiatrists).
Ferrier, Darwin and the West Riding Asylum Reports 1866–1875
Ferrier's neurology: Crichton-Browne spent almost ten years at the West Riding Asylum.Todd, John, and Lawrence E. Ashworth (1991) "The West Riding Asylum and James Crichton-Browne, 1818–1876", in Berrios, G. E., and Hugh Freeman (eds), 150 Years of British Psychiatry 1841–1991 London: Gaskell/ The Royal College of Psychiatrists, pp. 389–418.Finn, Michael A. (2012) The West Riding Lunatic Asylum and the making of the modern brain sciences in the nineteenth century, unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, University of Leeds. He believed that the asylum should be an educational as well as a therapeutic institution and set about a major research programme, bringing biological insights to bear on the causes of insanity. He supervised hundreds of post-mortem examinations of the brain and took a special interest in the clinical features of neurosyphilis. In 1872, Crichton-Browne developed his father's phrenological theories by inviting the Scottish neurologist David Ferrier (1843–1928) to direct the asylum laboratories and to conduct studies on the cortical localization of cerebral functions. (In 1832–34, William A. F. Browne had published a paper in the Phrenological Journal on language centres in the brainBrowne, W. A. F. (1832–34) "On Morbid Manifestations of the Organ of Language, as connected with insanity" The Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, 8, pp. 250–260, 308–316 and 414–423. and in his later writings there is a reiterated emphasis on the relationships of brain injury, psychosis and language). Ferrier's work at Wakefield transformed the asylum into a world centre for neuropsychiatry and he summarised his research in the neurological classic The Functions of the Brain (1876).Ferrier, David (1876) The Functions of The Brain London: Smith, Elder.